Wild Life

Wild Life by Molly Gloss. Houghton Mifflin, 255 pp., $13.00. Gloss's most recent book is like an exquisitely crafted, if obviously replica, patchwork quilt. Her prologue introduces a drawerful of writer Charlotte Bridger Drummond's papers from a granddaughter's point of view: leavings from the early 1900s in which some feminist press might be interested.

The novel itself is a read through that drawer, and such a read: the writer, a single mother of five boys, manages to maintain her family with her writing and the day-to-day help of a pessimistic housekeeper named Melba. When Melba's daughter, Florence, writes that her husband has taken their daughter, Harriet, to his logging camp in the Cascades foothills to spend the week, Melba is hardly surprised when the next missive tells her the child has disappeared, stolen by a creature like the wild ape-men some call Bigfoot. Charlotte determines to join the search, and naturally, she eventually becomes lost and, equally inevitably, is ultimately befriended by a sma ll band of the suspect wild people. While the journal or the letter have historically served as vehicles for picaresque novels, Gloss has carried the art steps further by combining narrative, journal entries, and the occasional letter. To this she adds bits and pieces of articles and book excerpts from the period and fragments of what's presented as Charlotte's own adventure fiction, whose hero is a Wild Man she calls Tattoosh. The book owes much to Robert Michael Pyle's Where Bigfoot Walks; it's his Dark Divide with Adventurous Heroine. And when Charlotte and her wild traveling companions wash by rolling in the morning-dewed grass, it's pure Lily Langtry as put into poetry by Pattiann Rogers. But such debts are to fine sources, and this book is a delicious read.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning